The Last Cruise

Sahara’s daughters pushed into the French doors of the kitchen, like outlaws swinging open the doors of a western saloon. Sahara tried not to give their exuberance too much attention—lest she became the subject of their next Snapchat of an ‘unhinged mother.’ Ashlyn, the younger and darker-skinned of the two, plopped her Stanley and keys down on the marble counter and exhaled loudly as if she was put out by the non-task of coming home at a reasonable hour.

“Hey Mom, Izzy and I are going to go cruising. That’s okay with you, right?” They didn’t really ask permission anymore for anything—well Isabella didn’t have to—she was 19, light skinned and in college. She could drive and supposedly help around the house. She also did the big adult thing of paying for her own phone. But Ashlyn was such a straight kid and rule follower that Sahara neglected to ever put her foot down with her. She stared at her daughter’s eager face, thinking about the time she begged Ashlyn to try underage drinking, just once, in their own home, because she didn’t want the girls experiencing those things in parking lots or at boys’ houses. Ashlyn declined the offer. The one time she took them to a punk show they complained of having to stand and that old people around them were getting drunk.

“We’re going cruising, Mom,” Izzy said.

Cruising.

Sahara thought about Santa Monica Boulevard and her gay uncles, and giggled that the girls could ask such a thing. Well, she could be a twelve-year-old at times, still laughing at fart jokes.

“Cruising? Isn’t that the once great-American-past-time-but-then-Mexicans-took-it-over-so-it-got-outlawed-but-now-it’s-legal-again-and-we’ve-acknowledged-as-a-culture-how-racist-that-was? Where do you plan to do this thing, you call “cruising?”

“You’re such a boomer,” said Isabella.

“Gen Xer. OMG, I am NOT a boomer,” it really infuriated Sahara, though, she always tried to hold it in so they wouldn’t mean-girl her for an hour.

“Whatever,” said Ashlyn, watching an eyeliner tutorial on her phone.

“Fuck you guys,” said Sahara, laughing. She did like that they could talk this way with her, and that they hadn’t turned out precious.

“But can we go?” Ashlyn asked. Sahara wondered if any of the SGA were going to—or would they think it lame? It would be kind of cool to see her old crew—her Sad Girl Army—they were there, her Sad Girl Army. They’d all gone their separate ways after what went down, but she loved them all. In the absence of any sort of police investigation leading to her doorstep or theirs, she knew they still loved her too.

“Yes, but I’m going to go with you,” she said, reminiscing of slow-moving borrowed convertibles and standing in the back seat or leaning seductively against a finely kept vintage ride.

“No!” The girls said with so much force and in such unison that it had the effect of making the cat jump off the back off the couch and run down the hall as if a toddler had grabbed their tail. The yelling brought Sahara out of her daydream.

“Ay, Mama,” said Izzy. “Why you gotta be old-school all of a sudden? No one wants their mother to go cruising with them.”

“Back in my day, you’d have to take little cousins with you to make sure nothing crazy went on and everyone came home still a virgin,” said Sahara.

“Ew. Mom! Gross. Why does everything always go there with you? It’s simply a cruising car meet-up,” said Ashlynn.

“A car meet-up? I thought you were going cruising. Ah wait. Is this one of those Gen Z sanitized things sanctioned by the city?” She could see it now. Gen Z and rules would take all the fun out of cruising. The racist mayor who somehow got the city to hold elections on a random day in March when people would forget to vote so he could keep his seat was undoubtedly faced with an overwhelming demographic truth—that Whittier was no longer a white town. And brown voters liked their vintage cars and cruising. He probably gave up a couple streets in Uptown for an afternoon to keep both his white and brown voters happy. Ashlyn handed Sahara the flyer. A meet up at Ricks Drive In and Out and then a car show in Uptown—exactly what Sahara had thought. Yup. Placating the Mexican Americans so we didn’t get too wild.

“Oh my god, girls. I must take you authentic cruising now, just out of principle.”

“Aye mama. Don’t come if you’re going to be like that,” said Izzy.

“Oh, so I can come now?”

“No Izzy! Don’t invite her!”

“Foo, who you think is going to pay for snacks? Not my midsemester broke ass.” Izzy shrugged at her mom. Her shrugs were the closest thing Sahara ever got to a thank you. Sahara gave them 40 bucks and told them to get dinner with it. Ashlynn grabbed it and the girls headed upstairs to change for the evening.

***

She’d not thought of Dahlia or Chelina in ages but remembering them brought a smile to her face. How they’d meet up in the parking lot before school, swimsuits under their uniforms so it wouldn’t be a lie—they did go to school, they just also went to the beach. Or ditching all together to go down to watch the red-carpet arrivals at the Dorothy Chandler or the Shrine. Their fake IDs that got them in to dance in Hollywood but not to drink. Stupid shit like that.

And how they took care of each other. It never mattered to them that Dahlia’s family lived below the boulevard and Sahara’s lived in Friendly Hills, or that Chelina didn’t live in their town at all. They were a hood all their own. Dahlia didn’t wind up going to college after high school but worked union at the supermarket instead, spending her wages keeping Sahara and Chelina fed as they chipped away at community college then UCs with barely any help from anyone else. Back then they let you in and dared you to graduate. After graduation they vowed to do the same for her. But then Dahlia met Cruz, and then he started beating on her they were right there to—

Sahara couldn’t let her mind go there, not to wife-beating Cruz. She swallowed the urge to spit as she remembered his name. Not going there. No. She put the kettle on for some herbal tea; her girls would be awhile getting ready. She willed herself to think of the beginning of her friendship with Dahlia and Chelina—way before graduation. Spring of their Freshmen year at St. Paul. When Dahlia arrived as a transfer from the convent school and she and Chelina decided to check out the new kid who was humming “In Between Days” in the hallway with her back straight and head held high like she wasn’t the new kid, as if no one else was there.

As the trio became friends, they’d stand for hours in front of full-length mirrors making their hair go as high as they could with enough Aquanet to be personally responsible for the ozone layer  depletion and getting their eyeliner to do the Siouxsie and the Banshees thing. They would be the girls to make Morrissey of the Smiths like girls. Or throw themselves at Robert Smith’s feet. They made plans to move to England after graduation. Probably Manchester. They watched the news on August 31sttogether and finally opened the windows.

It was August 1985, and an unusually sweltering summer. But everyone’s windows were locked tight, just like the doors with maybe a chair propped with its back under the doorknob, something else that would make noise if someone tried to break in. No one had air conditioning. So, it was miserable, but Night Stalker proofed. He’d been everywhere that spring and summer: from Whittier to Northridge to Diamond Bar and now deep into Orange County and up to Sierra Madre and Monterey Park and Monrovia. No place seemed safe. They sweated out the waiting to be delivered, for the cops finally to get the guy. And of course, they always knew it was a guy.

The three girls were inseparable, and they reasoned, harder to nab as a pack. But they were having fun too, and it was nice to be part of a trio.

In that season of the Night Stalker, in their non-airconditioned houses the girls felt suffocated by his potential presence, and formed their lifelong alliance. They confessed to each other that they could go to bed at night without the nightmare of dried blood splattered on a wall and then again splattered on the nightly news. No one’s imagination subsided and all was reaffirmed in the morning paper.

There had been no pattern. Everyone had been the Night Stalker’s demographic. No woman followed to her car. No man robbed for his riches. The Night Stalker had raped 80-year-old women and used their own kitchen knives against them.

It became hard to make dinner, to wash the knives and place them on the drying mat without seeing their potential.

Now, Sahara recalled the story. It hadn’t been the cops that caught him. The Night Stalker had tried to jack a car in Boyle Heights on a Sunday morning and had been chased down by an entire neighborhood of men. A man and his sons stopped the murderer with a metal pipe from a chain link fence. Richard Ramirez had been held down and beaten in the middle of Hubbard Street by vatos and their kids to the point where the serial killer begged them to turn him over to the police. They beat the living shit out of him and he puked green when the cops who saved him pulled him out at Hollenbeck station. A whole neighborhood recognized him for what he was and wanted blood.

The Sad Girl Army as they nicknamed themselves celebrated that night by opening the windows wide at Dahlia’s grandma’s house and stood there in the den before the dusty screens in their bras and cutoff shorts breathing in the metal air. The freedom of air. It was still 80 degrees at 10 pm that night. They’d felt terrorized since March when a Night Stalker attack had gone down in unincorporated Whittier only two blocks from Dahlia’s grandma. It freaked them out and toughened them up good.  Something in that fear bonded them together, not to cower the way they may have separately, but instead to stand together and fight like a neighborhood affronted, a final blow to childhoods that had already seen too much. And it was this, and not some cheesy Hollywood stereotype that made them sisters, made them blood.

It also served to teach them how recognizable one can be to some people and completely invisible to others. It was a brown convenience store clerk who first recognized the Night Stalker from the cover of La Opinion while he bought chewing gum at her counter. The officer on the scenehad his doubts. A lesson the girls learned well. One’s safety was a matter to take into one’s own hands, and it did not need the cover of darkness. They hailed from a people who took care of it themselves.

At this Sahara smiled down at the cat and rubbed its head for agreement. She missed Dahlia and Chelina and she wondered if enough time had gone by for a reunion.

Chelina was the only one who had made it to England that she knew of.

Was she still there? She’d left after things went down with Cruz and the rest. Off to Oxford for that PhD. Sahara had gotten pregnant with Isabella in her senior year of college, and waited to go to law school when her girls were old enough for elementary school. And Dahlia. Did she get away too?

The kettle whistled at Sahara, and she snapped out of her alternative yearbook memories.

She poured a cup of chamomile tea and took deep sips and thought about how funny it was that on Friday nights she sipped chamomile tea. She hadn’t been out of the house except to go to court or the grocery store in ages. She’d taken to internet shopping for everything else and trail walks early in the morning when there were fewer people around.

She heard the giggle of her daughters on the stairs. She didn’t want them going cruising without her. When she was twelve, she was allowed to go but only with her tía and her future too and that was more to stop them from doing anything premarital than it was to show her or her cousins a good time.

When cruising was outlawed, the authorities had decided it was finally too dangerous. Sixteen homicides in one season. Too many young men had died defending a very specific definition of respect, of territory—one that seemed incongruous to the American empire that needed that kind of brawn exported to Middle Eastern deserts instead. It seemed idiotic to authorities who would rather them shipped off to fight for oil companies or help topple democracies in their ancestral homelands in Latin America. Something useful for the masses in exchange for possible healthcare and a promise of education. Fighting for a corner or a block or dignity was too much autonomy and made no sense to outsiders.

“Mom! Don’t go with us,” said Ashlynn from the stairs, “we look good though, right?”

Ashlynn startled Sahara out of her head. She stared up at her girls with their TikTok cat eyes and their La Virgen halter tops.

“Girl, you’re half white. You can’t pull off that lip liner. Maybe take it down a notch. You don’t want to give someone an excuse to kick your ass,” said Sahara.

“Mom, it’s not like that no more,” said Isabella, whose mother stared at her until she corrected herself, “anymore.”

“You guys speak like I didn’t educate you.” She could see that both of them were about to break out in giggles. “Tell you what, we can both go but not in the same car and I’ll keep my distance. It will be like you don’t even know me.”

“We can’t flirt with guys if we know you’re gonna be there,” said Ashlynn, “besides we wanted to take your Beetle.”

“You’ll find a way to flirt with the guys, trust me,” Sahara said, “and I’m taking my own ride.”

“Mama! We can’t show up in the KIA!” the girls wailed. Sahara fixed her makeup in the downstairs bathroom, ran a brush through her long black hair, and changed into a plain black mesh top and switched out her jeans to something crisper than the mom jeans she’d been wearing. She pulled her go-to black heels out of the hall closet and took the convertible black Beetle’s keys down from the hook and turned to her daughters with a smirk.

“Ride or die, bitches,” she said. They looked at each other startled and amazed and too dumbfounded to argue with their mother’s confidence.

“Fine. I can’t really drive stick anyhow,” said Isabella.

“Yeah, we know,” said Ashlynn.

****

Sahara, Dahlia, and Chelina had all met their men while cruising on Friday nights along Whittier

Boulevard, and at the time mostly borrowed Chelina’s older brother’s truck to do so. He’d been locked up and transferred the truck into her name with the understanding that when he got out it was his again. He just didn’t want any spare assets lying around for confiscation. It was a mini truck from the 80s but he kept it pristine and low, and it barely made it over a curve anywhere they went without scraping the bottom, weighted down by the three women. Chelina at the wheel, Sahara at the passenger window and Dahlia in the back of the cab on the board that wasn’t a seat at all. They pushed her head down anytime the cops rolled by. Chelina’s brother was the only criminal they knew, and they knew he’d done far more than he’d gone to prison for and the little stretch of Pico Rivera Chelina hailed from was glad for the vacation time from him.

Tyrus, the girls’ father, was a white boy from one of those families in Hacienda Heights that went insane when the Buddhist temple went in, claiming rich Taiwanese would somehow bring down the property value. They went quiet after the property value tripled and they sold their place to a Taiwanese family and moved to Idaho.

Except for Tyrus that is, who lived in his aunt’s garage along the boulevard that was going to be converted into its own apartment but never was. His band was about to take off; he could feel it and didn’t want to leave. He had hazel eyes and curly hair and wore thin framed gold glasses and blamed his father for, well, everything. He was an entrepreneur, he told Sahara, going for his MBA and it took her far too long to figure out all his business ventures were all illegal. That he’d not gone beyond community college would have been fine, but he lied about it and couldn’t seem to stop lying, his share of the rent money appearing in boxes of product to sell for his latest get rich quick schemes rather than a check for her to deposit. But he was damn fine when he was on stage and the band was going places and Sahara was young and let too many things slide.

She knew better now. Now she poured over contracts and details and knew all the fine print before anyone else did. Sometimes she dated but mostly she enjoyed her own company and the company of her daughters—the two things Tyrus had given her that were no lie—her children.

Chelina’s man, Emilio, was initially the nicest of the men with the sweetest ride, a white Galaxy 500 with red interior and they were all amazed it was still on the road and ditched the mini truck any chance they got to ride in the back of the Galaxy instead. From the red interior, they checked out the scene. He stayed all the way down Whittier Boulevard towards Atlantic—where the bulk of the murders went down before the outlawing of cruising altogether. He was truly beautiful too, easy on the eyes and had that look of a brown man about to be discovered and groomed for a white audience. He could have been a model. Just handsome. Perfection itself.

He was a sweetheart—but Chelina’s parents were never going to approve and while it was exciting for Chelina to be dating a bad boy gangbanger, it began to feel too Montague, too Capulet and though he excited her, she had no interest in dying. Her parents already had their son to contend with and did not need another bad boy in the house.

It was Dahlia’s man, Cruz, that changed everything for them. It was after the first black eye, that Dahlia told her homegirls to mind their own business, that she could handle things herself. It was after her second black eye that Chelina and Sahara began to talk about the necessity of getting something done. Her husband, she said, was true to his word, was a good provider for her and the babies, even if he did get annoyed at her and the kids once in a while and let off steam.

“He let out steam on your face, Dahlia,” said Chelina.

“This is why he keeps saying we’re no good for you to hang out with,” Sahara remembered saying to her bruised friend, who bit her lip rather than cry. He knew the other two parts of the trio would say something, try to get Dahlia to leave. He forbade Dahlia to see them. Dahlia and her man, a mechanic by trade, had gone about life fast and before you knew it there were three babies under five years old, and she quit the union job at the supermarket. When the mechanic he worked for retired and gave the shop to his son instead of letting Cruz buy it, he went a little crazy and bought a lot across the street and slowly started to build his own yard, buying used equipment off eBay and setting it all up himself. Chelina had an idea and shared it with Sahara. They didn’t dare tell Dahlia.

****

The meet up at Rick’s was full of Gen Z for a block around. A whole sidewalk’s worth of selfie-takers and influencers live on TikTok. Sahara wasn’t dissing it. She actually thought it a was kind of cute. Were her friends any different at their age? They’d spend hours looking in the mirror to get their hair perfect then bring a full can of hairspray into the car with them anyhow, checking themselves in the rearview mirror. They’d take Polaroids when they had the money to get film, or they’d splurge on a throw away camera and a few months later actually take it in to get developed. Same concept, different era.

Ashlynn and Izzy insisted that she let them out a block away, which she did, so they could walk up to check out the scene. She laughed as she watched other parents doing the same. She parked the car in front of Zumaya’s café across the street and down half a block so she could eat something other than the greasy burger and fries that Rick’s offered.

****

The first one that had to go was Dahlia’s, though for the record, Dahlia never asked for any of it. She didn’t have to—that’s what a good homegirl is for. Not only was he beating Dahlia again, but he was losing money, staying out late with other women and she started doing manicures at home to make ends meet. Chelina and Sahara hated seeing her this way and decided something had to be done.

Sahara could still smell the auto yard in her dreams; they didn’t have cameras in the yards back then, and—as Chelina had observed—who buys used equipment off eBay that isn’t up to date on safety regulations? She had made an excellent point.

His assistant was the one who found him. The boy came in after school to help out with whatever needed doing, but that day he found Cruz underneath the car lift he’d just installed, the old Falcon he was working on, had landed on top of him. The car lift had buckled.

Chelina and Sahara said they were sorry to hear it, when Dahlia broke the news to them that her Cruz was dead. She got subsidized daycare for a while and got her old job back a few months later and it was like she could become the Dahlia she was meant to be in this new timeline. There’d been an insurance policy pay out. She had him cremated and kept him in a mayonnaise jar beneath the garage sink, though she told his parents that was him in the cool vase she bought to put in her dining room altar. The altar had La Virgen, a candle, some plastic marigolds atop the ceramic vase. The ash in the bottom of the vase was made from the wishes she’d written out on handmade paper over nights when Cruz didn’t come home or came home in the wee hours of the morning smelling of other women and beer. She burned the list after the cops came to the door to tell her there’d been an accident—and before she called her homegirls.

****

“Do the seat belts actually work in this thing, Mom? Oh my god, we could be killed,” exclaimed an over dramatic Ashlyn. The crowd headed south from Rick’s. Sahara put the black bug with the black leather interior into gear and drove down to the boulevard, headed west towards Los Angeles.

“You know we used to sit up, and our feet were where your behinds are right? To cruise you need one person to drive and the other two to be able to look around, flirt, be on the lookout, everything,” said Sahara. She was beginning to feel like she did when she took them to that punk show. How had she raised these two creatures who never wanted to get their hands dirty? Maybe it was those summers they spent in Idaho with Tyrus’ parents that made them soft. She’d thought the opposite would happen—that his parents would take them shooting or camping or hunting or something. They reported back that they had indeed done all those things and learned all the rules that went with them.

“It just doesn’t feel safe to tell us to do that, Mom. CPS is gonna get you,” said Izzy.

“Good Lord. You’re 19. CPS doesn’t give a shit after you turn 18. Now you’re choosing to live with me,” Sahara said.

“Mom!” Both girls said in unison as Sahara broke hard—but safely—so as not to rear end the car in front of her. So, they were really boulevard cruising, and the road was a sweet five miles an hour.

****

Tyrus knew enough not to do that shit in front of the kids, but he didn’t seem to know enough not to do it at all. Sahara had been increasingly concerned. So much so that she opened a secret bank account and put her paychecks and grant money there rather than put it in the joint account where it would evaporate with no explanation and no tangible evidence of spending. The first time she caught him, a class had been canceled so she picked the girls up early from daycare and headed home to make dinner, and there he was in the living room, shirt off, arm poked, syringe on the coffee table. They’d stopped having sex months before and she was never really sure which one of them had called it a day first. She had too much to do to finish law school and take care of the girls and find the right internship and he took forever to get hard and even longer to finish and she wanted it no longer than the time it took to brush one’s teeth. He stopped trying altogether and took to not bathing and wearing long sleeve shirts even in summer. She really should have known.

The trio was hanging out again—and mostly getting together at Dahlia’s since she didn’t have to worry about a husband coming home screaming at her anymore. Sahara took the girls over to play with Dahlia’s kids and told Chelina and Dahlia what was going on.

“If he’s not willing to get clean, I wish he’d just overdose already and get it over with,” she said to her friends, “It’s too confusing for the girls.”

“Would you want to be with him if he was clean?” Chelina asked.

“Probably not. I’m just afraid of his parents. They have all that money. I could see them helping him get custody or trying to get it themselves if the courts figured out his drug use,” Sahara said, adding, “they’d at least try to get Izzy. She’s the light one after all. Ashlynn looks too much like me—and they hate that.”

“Who’s his dealer?” said Chelina, “I bet Emilio knows him.” Chelina was still seeing Emilio now and then but mostly dating fellow grad students at UCLA he didn’t know about.

“Dude, how would I know that? I barely knew that he was using again, and I wouldn’t know if I hadn’t have walked in with the girls. I had to pretend I forgot something in the car, and we went and got pizza and ate in the park giving him a chance to get that stuff out of there. And oh my god, we come home, and he asks me if I saved any pizza for him!”

“What? Dude. That’s so fucked up,” said Chelina. Chelina who looked at Dahlia. They nodded to each other. Something had to be done.

“Well, he can’t keep this up. It’s not good for the girls. Something needs to change,” said Dahlia.

A few weeks later, Sahara saw the light on in the garage at 3:00 AM and went out there in her robe to tell him enough was enough with his crackhead stay up all night ways. The old side door on the freestanding garage was weathered and warped, and she put all her weight against it to open it. She found Tyrus face down on the garage floor, needle in his arm next to the weight bench he never used anymore. She approached cautiously and saw that he was not breathing and walked quickly back to the house to call 911. She held the kitchen phone in her hand about to press the numbers. Could he be saved? It wasn’t that unusual for him to stay up that late. It wasn’t like he was useful or paid anything towards the upkeep of his children. He took odd jobs when she nagged him to contribute. She sighed. She didn’t like the visual reminder of the person he had made her become—weak and willing to overlook so much all for some mediocre dick she no longer wanted. She’d outgrown their first exciting nights of her watching him on stage in some band that was going to make it big before Ashlyn was born. Now he was just a habit. Her habit of wanting her children’s father there and his habits that held him to a floor with a needle in his arm.

The key to Sahara’s survival was going to law school on the down low. To not call attention to herself. To think the way those surrounding her did of her so she could live undetected. Think hair. Think nails. Think babies. Think boxes. Her family’s misogyny, her in-laws worked to her advantage. No one expected anything from her except marriage and children, and she had done both. Now it was her turn.

She made herself a snack of cheese and sliced apples and a cup of tea. When Chelina pulled up and knocked on the kitchen door.

“Is he?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Sahara said.

“Go find him, then call the cops. I’ll be at Dahlia’s. I’ll come over to comfort you after you call.”

Sahara stared at her friend, leaning against the washing machine in the corner of her kitchen and understood what had gone down. Then nodded as her friend went back out the kitchen door.

It was 6:30 AM when she looked up at the clock again, lost in her thoughts for all that time. She picked up the phone and dialed 911.

“He could not be saved”, the paramedics said, and the sirens woke up the neighborhood and the girls, and she told the police officers she woke up and realized he’d not come to bed and came downstairs and saw the light on in the garage and found him there. It seemed completely plausible. She needed to be with her girls and yes, he did have a drug problem that he’d been trying to overcome. The officers looked around the mostly tidy house, the bookcases. The little kids. Told her they were sorry for her loss.

At noon she called his parents to tell them the news. To their credit they asked about the girls and how they were taking things. Tyrus mostly came home after the girls went to sleep and was gone before they got up or would just sleep all day and he had rarely interacted with them for months. Sahara told his parents they were in shock and that she’d call again soon.

*****

“Hey Dahlia—is that you?” Sahara yelled to the car one lane over and ahead of her. The back of the woman’s head looked just like Dahlia. The woman turned around and squinted in the twilight. She didn’t recognize the driver—too far for her eyesight, but Dahlia knew that car anywhere.

“Girl, is that you? Sahara! Damn. How’ve you been?” She yelled over the traffic. She was with a man, Sahara didn’t recognize. The man put his blinker on indicating that he was pulling over and Sahara went even slower so they could pass in front of her and then she pulled behind them and got out of the Beetle. Isabella and Ashlyn looked at each other and then at their mother bewildered. Their mama always acted like she didn’t know anyone and here they were pulled over on the side of the boulevard.

“Sahara, this is Omar. Omar, this is Sahara. An old friend of mine who is a bit of a recluse,” said Dahlia. Omar smiled at her politely. He was balding but had thick Elvis sideburns and was wearing one of those retro bowling shirts the rockabilly crowd loves.

“Where are the kids?” inquired Sahara. They were slightly older than her own, so she scolded herself for thinking they’d be hanging with their mom on a Friday night.

“They’re all grown up although there’s two more since the last time I saw you. My 20-year-old is watching the twins while we have date night.”

“How old are they?” Sahara asked. Wow. More kids?

“Seven last month.”

“Mine are right here cruising with me. Actually, it was their idea,” Sahara said.

“You still have that great looking Bug! I can’t believe it.”

“And you with a Thunderbird. Yours Omar?” He went to answer but Dahlia cut him off.

“Mine,” Dahlia said, kissing his cheek, “I let him drive it though.”

“I got my own ride, Ms. Sahara. Aquamarine 58 Chevy Truck,” Omar said.

“I know that model. My grandfather had that. Beautiful truck. Pinche primo stole it out from under the rest of us before my Abuelo passed away. But he fixed her up sweet. I’ll give him credit for that. Want to meet my girls?”

Isabella and Ashlyn had their mouths wide open. Here their mom hadn’t even wanted to go out and now she had them pulled over on the side of the boulevard, telling them to stay in the car that she was just saying hi to someone she thought she knew, and it would only be a minute. Now they were having a full-on reunion. The girls kept the video rolling and posted the video titled “The secret life of your wannabe chola mother.” Ashlynn narrated while Isabella held the phone.

“So, they, like, just drove around, without GPS or anything back in the day. And sometimes they stopped to look at all the cars or grab something to eat. Oh, and they all had to have a thing called a Thomas Brothers. Yeah. I thought it would be like Dutch Bros., too but it turns out it’s this insane book of maps,” informed Ashlynn into the camera.

Dahlia and Omar waved hello to Sahara’s girls.

“You hear from Chelina ever?” asked Sahara of her old friend.

“Nah, you?”

“Never.”

They chatted a bit more and exchanged phone numbers, and as they walked away to get back in their cars, they both raised their right index fingers to their right eye. Then laughed in recognition and waved goodbye. That had been their code for Sad Girl Army.

*****

When Emilio found out Chelina had traded him in for a few pre-med students at UCLA, he fucking lost it. He wanted names. He wanted addresses. She tried to point out to him that he was also seeing other people and that they owed each other nothing. Besides she was about to do a semester abroad and it was unrealistic that they’d stay together forever. He pointed out that they’d been cruising together for years and that he thought eventually they’d settle down together, get married when her parents died and couldn’t disrespect him anymore. He was waiting for her. Didn’t she know that? He was waiting for her. And if she wasn’t interested why the fuck hadn’t she said something sooner. He bet the med students were white.

“We aren’t a couple, Emilio, we just get together and fuck once in a while. But not anymore if you’re going to be like this,” said Chelina.

“My boys and I are gonna find out,” said Emilio.

Chelina went silent. She felt trapped and she certainly didn’t want to put the pre-med students nor the engineers she was also seeing in harm’s way. It was three weeks to the study abroad summer. She could make it till then. She could fake loving Emilio that long. She had to.

But it was Dahlia and Sahara who had paid a visit to Chelina’s brother. He’d been out for five years and was a veteran now. No gangbanging for him but he had the respect given to an elder who did time for his hood.

“My sister did this to herself,” her brother said. I’m staying clean, but I know a vato from Emilo’s rivals. Maybe they can help you.” The duo nodded in agreement. Dahlia looked at him with thankful eyes. Sahara stood up and walked right up to him and softly kissed his neck and reached up and pulled down his face to hers.

“Thank you,” Sahara said. Chelina’s brother stepped back.

“And for fuck’s sake, you did not visit me, you got that? You didn’t pay me no $1000 either. You girls are trouble. It’s always the smart ones. Goddamn,” Chelina’s brother said.

He took out his burner phone to make a call he didn’t want to make.

“We want to make sure she makes her plane,” said Dahlia.

****

They weren’t there when it happened, but everybody heard about it. Emilio had gotten what he had coming to him, having pissed way too many people off. There’d been sixteen cruising deaths that year, mostly on the LA side of the boulevard. It wasn’t even summer yet. Things were getting crazy. They had to be shut it down.

Chelina went to England and sent postcards to Dahlia and Sahara that summer and then she wrote that fall to tell them she was staying to study at Oxford. And then she wrote to tell them she met a man. And then that she’d gotten married. That she planned to become a professor over there. Always postcards, no address. And then that she wrote that she wasn’t coming back.

But they knew that when they put her on the plane.

****

Sahara’s daughters were still asleep the next morning when Sahara left to go to early Mass and confession. She decided to walk. She looked down at her phone at the message that just buzzed its presence on Signal. It was Dahlia.

“You know, it was good to see you. But I don’t know.” Sahara knew. She had the exact same feeling.

“Nah. We’re good. I’ll always love you, you know,” texted Sahara back to one of the two people on the planet that knew her, got her, didn’t judge her.

“I love you too. More even,” texted Dahlia.

“Por Vida,” texted Sahara.

“Por Vida,” texted Dahlia.

And at that moment, a plane flew high in the sky above Sahara, and she wondered to herself if it was bound for England. She thought about Emilio, Tyrus, and Cruz. Their evils were just everyday living. Nothing to get excited about, nothing monstrous. They were just straight men doing the work of their version of love, that is to say—making the women in their lives miserable, diminishing them. They were their demographic, their pattern. And Sahara, Chelina, and Dahlia were just protecting their turf, their territory even if the world around them claimed they had no right to their own bodies, their own futures.

She had no regrets. Her daughters were doing great. Dahlia’s family was good too. And Chelina she imagined was succeeding at whatever she was going thousands of miles from them.

She pushed open the heavy wooden door of St. Mary’s and walked to the confessional and stood before it for a long, long time. She realized she didn’t know what to say. She could confess that it had been a long time since her last confession. That she had never baptized her children. That she had—

And then she smiled to herself, and a wave of peace washed over her. She walked over to the alcove where a statue of Mary resided and lit a candle instead.